Book Publishing's Real Nemesis
- Amazon vs. Apple And The Agency 5: Let's Get The Facts Straight (Indie Author)
- The Worst Article About The eBooks Anti-Trust Suit (Mike Cane's xBlog) — Is it worse than the Mashable article I dissected? Let me know what you think.
- Don't Be Fooled: Big Publishing Hates Competition (Let's Get Digital)
- Publish and Perish – Clueless Publishing CEO's Enjoy an Intimate Dinner (The Passive Voice) — Did you know 16 states also filed antitrust suits against Apple and the Agency Five (as they are apparently being called)? Hey, those AG's gotta do something to get re-elected! Look below the excerpts for PG's advice to CEO's on how to meet without risking an antitrust lawsuit. Utterly ridiculous the obstacles and waste forced on the market by the state.
- Monopoly Power Makes You Fat, Dumb and Slow (The Passive Voice) — I like this one mainly for this quote:
Absent stringent government protection or physical boundaries that protect the monopoly, the long-term effects of overly-dominating a market tend to weaken the company or companies involved. If competition is permitted, the bloated and inefficient monopolist can present an easy target for an innovative and flexible competitor.
PG's conception of monopoly is not rigorous, however, and he overlooks the fact that what made Microsoft an aggressive monopoly is intellectual property, that government grant of monopoly privilege that has no place in a free market.
- Cut in E-Book Pricing by Amazon Is Set to Shake Rivals (The Passive Voice) — The NYT article PG quotes is worthless, but read his observation at the end as well as the first comment on the post; they highlight an important characteristics of leftist critics of Amazon.
- The Agency Model Sucks (A Newbie's Guide to Publishing) — J.A. Konrath does the math to demonstrate that authors make less money under the agency model. It's bad for customers and authors.
- The biggest problem facing book publishing (The Domino Project) — Perfect for the publishers, not for anyone else, not even the authors they publish. Otherwise, I tend to like what Seth Godin has to say about publishing.
- Death To The Gatekeepers: Bezos Talks Innovation In The Publishing Space (TechCrunch)
- Jeff Bezos's Top 10 Leadership Lessons (Forbes) — Big Publishers in particular, take note of how customer-centric Bezos's leadership lessons are, and also how focused on adaptability and innovation.
- Live From Washington, DC: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God); Let the Private Space Race Begin! (Reason's Hit & Run) — Good bye, space shuttle. Good riddance. So long, and thanks for all the waste. Amateur hour is over and now it's time for the Space Age to really begin, led by savvy entrepreneurs and funded by visionary capitalists.
Is it me? Or is this Reason piece trying too hard (TTH) to be hip and funny with all the pop culture references and whatnot?
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Comments on this entry are closed.
James April 18, 2012 @ 11:33 am | Link
Here’s my take on the DoJ antitrust story:
http://techsavvywriter.com/2012/04/keeping-score/
It’s not a particularly Libertarian view, and I’m more of a Socrates kind of guy.
Stephan Kinsella April 18, 2012 @ 12:45 pm | Link
The post by Mike Cane about the “worst article” does a good job tearing it apart–yes, it is pretty bad. However Cane seems to unfortunately accept the legitimacy of antitrust law: he quotes the criticized article as saying: “Let’s stipulate that there may have been some manner of price-fixing here…” and writes in response:
“That’s a smarmy way of saying, “Stupid Government! Let’s just pretend those incompetents actually had a case…” Right, like the DoJ complaint didn’t have dates and times and reference phone records. He is really spitting on the amount of fine work that went into that complaint.”
Fine work? Wow. The DOJ is criminal.
Stephan Kinsella April 18, 2012 @ 12:49 pm | Link
BTW see also this podcast discussing all this: http://surprisinglyfree.com/2012/04/17/spencer-weber-waller/
Geoffrey Allan Plauché April 18, 2012 @ 3:09 pm | Link
Yeah. Cane actually commented on my earlier post that rips apart that Mashable article, asking if I really meant that price fixing, collusion, and cartels should not be illegal. See my response.